The module formerly known as PerlMonksChat has gone through a major
transformation. Because its functionality now includes much more
than the chat part of PerlMonks, I have split it into several
modules: PerlMonks (base module), PerlMonks::Chat (chat stuff),
PerlMonks::Users (users and XP stuff) and
PerlMonks::NewestNodes (a threaded interface to the Newest Nodes
page).

The code is too large to post it here, so I'll point you to
the web
page instead.

There are a number of clients that use these modules. Check
out my home node for the full list.

Today I finally gathered the willpower to put everything related to the PerlMonks modules on the sourceforge project that I created for them a looong time ago. I have also moved the web page there.

But now I have a more fundamental question. Regrettably, I have been essentially absent from PerlMonks for a long time, and it seems that a lot of things have changed, technically speaking. The modules in their current form no longer work, and I have tons of chatbox messages and patches that people have sent me about this (to all of them: thank you!). On the other hand, the on-site chat page mentioned above by elusion seems to work perfectly.

So my question is: is it worth spending the effort to upgrade and clean up the PerlMonks modules to keep them current to the times, or should we just let them die? Are people still interested in using them? If this is the case, I will start working on fixing things. A few fundamental changes are necessary, including:

Using some XML-parsing module instead of the hand-coded cruft I got there now.

Using the new displaytype=xml nodes.

Anything else I have missed.

Now that the CVS is available on sourceforge, it should be easier for people to submit patches. Certainly, if anyone shows enough interest, I'd be happy to give them access as developers to the CVS repository :-)

Personally, I'm not sure there's that big a need. Using LWP::UserAgent and XML::Simple I cooked up a chatterbox client in an hour. Now that we have tickers for just about anything you might want one for as well as displaytype=xml, I think what's rather needed is thourough, centralized documentation of these. Currently, information about the tickers is randomly scattered throughout the site and can only be found via judicious use of Google and Super Search. I'm currently working on collecting nodes with info about the tickers and want to write some overview documentation from them, to put on my homenode (or maybe I'll ask for some space on jcwren's http://perlmonk.org server).

That said, I did refactor some of my simple client's code into a tiny module..

I am quite happily using a patched version of the modules together with the Perl/Tk chatterbox client, and I would like to see them continued (or at least I would like a replacement that is a bit cleaner).

By the way: there is some other part you missed in your changes, and that converting the documentation to POD, including all the usual parts that we expect from perl module documentation: NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION etc etc.

--
Joost downtime n. The period during which a system
is error-free and immune from user input.

I tried to use the Shendal's Tk Chatterbox client (on WinXP), but between the client and your Chat modules something seemed to be broken. Am I right in thinking that CB went from using HTML to using XML, and Chat.pm did not follow?

I'd like to help one way or another to bring back to life a Tk CB client. Please /msg me if you wish to discuss it.

It seems that these modules have stopped working, possibly due to the Perlmonks Server Move. I've patched it up hurridly, and it seems to work. Probably the Correct Solution is to change everything over to using the XML modules, but not only do I not have the time (or knowledge), but this isn't my code, so I'll stick to minimal patching. (Hope you don't mind this much, ZZamboni.)

Because of the somewhat buggy nature of these modules and the clients that use them, I feel this is a good place to advertise the not-very-well-known on-site framechat. It works well, and is definitely more reliable than the other clients.

I would like to take over the maintenance of these modules. ZZamboni created a sourceforge project for them, where I donwloaded them and discovered that these don't work either.

I /msg'd him to ask if he'd mind if I'd take over and put it on CPAN. But I haven't heard from him since. I use the modules for a client I'm writing myself. If I don't hear from him, I'll take the sources, apply the patches and put it on CPAN. Unless someone else objects with good reasons of course :)

I'm guessing this hasn't been working for a while. This helps to show why you shouldn't parse XML with regular expressions. The main change is that I'm using XML::Simple to parse the XML. These is another small bug fix with splice that causes some annoyance warnings.